Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to more than 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
What will you create?
The Standard Ebooks project is a volunteer driven, not-for-profit effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.
The Hidden Palace is a community dedicated to the preservation of video game development media
Enter the Open Library Explorer, Cami’s new experiment for browsing more than 4 million books in the Internet Archive’s Open Library. Still in beta, Open Library Explorer is able to harness the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress classification systems to recreate virtually the experience of browsing the bookshelves at a physical library. Open Library Explorer enables readers to scan bookshelves left to right by subject, up and down for subclassifications. Switch a filter and suddenly the bookshelves are full of juvenile books. Type in “subject: biography” and you see nothing but biographies arranged by subject matter.
Why recreate a physical library experience in your browser?
Now that classrooms and libraries are once again shuttered, families are turning online for their educational and entertainment needs. With demand for digital books at an all-time high, the Open Library team was inspired to give readers something closer to what they enjoy in the physical world. Something that puts the power of discovery back into the hands of patrons.
Escaping the Algorithmic Bubble
One problem with online platforms is the way they guide you to new content. For music, movies, or books, Spotify, Netflix and Amazon use complicated recommendation algorithms to suggest what you should encounter next. But those algorithms are driven by the media you have already consumed. They put you into a “filter bubble” where you only see books similar to those you’ve already read. Cami and his team devised the Open Library Explorer as an alternative to recommendation engines. With the Open Library Explorer, you are free to dive deeper and deeper into the stacks. Where you go is driven by you, not by an algorithm..
Zoom out to get an ever expanding view of your library
Change the setting to make your books 3D, so you can see just how thick each volume is.
Cool New Features
By clicking on the Settings gear, you can customize the look and feel of your shelves. Hit the 3D options and you can pick out the 600-page books immediately, just by the thickness of the spine. When a title catches your eye, click on the book to see whether Open Library has an edition you can preview or borrow. For more than 4 million books, borrowing a copy in your browser is just a few clicks away.
Ready to enter the library? Click here, and be sure to share feedback so the Open Library team can make it even better.
The papers summarized here are mainly from 2017 onwards.
Please refer to the Survey paper(Image Aesthetic Assessment:An Experimental Survey) before 2016.
Optical illusions don’t “trick the eye” nor “fool the brain”, nor reveal that “our brain sucks”, … but are fascinating!
They also teach us about our visual perception, and its limitations. My selection emphazises beauty and interactive experiments; I also attempt explanations of the underlying visual mechanisms where possible.
Returning visitor? Check →here for History/News
»Optical illusion« sounds derogative, as if exposing a malfunction of the visual system. Rather, I view these phenomena as highlighting particular good adaptations of our visual system to its experience with standard viewing situations. These experiences are based on normal visual conditions, and thus under unusual contexts can lead to inappropriate interpretations of a visual scene (=“Bayesian interpretation of perception”).
If you are not a vision scientist, you might find my explanations too highbrow. That is not on purpose, but vision research simply is not trivial, like any science. So, if an explanation seems gibberish, simply enjoy the phenomenon 😉.
A showcase with creative machine learning experiments
Web scraping describes techniques for automatically downloading and processing web content, or converting online text and other media into structured data that can then be used for various purposes. In short, the user writes a program to browse and analyze the web on their behalf, rather than doing so manually. This is a common practice in silicon valley, where open html pages are transformed into private property: Facebook began as a (horny) web scraping project, as did Google and all other search engines. Web scraping is also frequently used to acquire the massive datasets needed to train machine learning models, and has become an important research tool in fields such as journalism and sociology.
I define "scrapism" as the practice of web scraping for artistic, emotional, and critical ends. It combines aspects of data journalism, conceptual art, and hoarding, and offers a methodology to make sense of a world in which everything we do is mediated by internet companies. These companies surveill us, vacuum up every trace we leave behind, exploit our experiences and interject themselves into every possible moment. But in turn they also leave their own traces online, traces which when collected, filtered, and sorted can reveal (and possibly even alter) power relations. The premise of scrapism is that everything we need to know about power is online, hiding in plain sight.
This is a work-in-progress guide to web scraping as an artistic and critical practice, created by Sam Lavigne. I will be updating it over the coming months! I'll also be doing occasional live demos either on Twitch or YoutTube.
Conceptual comics is an archive of works that are unaffiliated with the commonly accepted history of the comics medium. It is a resonating chamber for conceptual works and unconventional practices that are little known outside of our community but also a springboard for establishing the conditions for an affective lineage between similarly minded practitioners. The variety of the collected material expresses the curator’s choice for a non uniform consistency and claim instead for a perpetual becoming of the medium. Nevertheless, these works share with each other many common issues and urgencies, alternating between material self-reflexivity and critical exhaustion. They operate on the margins of distribution and reception and their unlocatedness in the medium's spectrum is more than an abstraction: artists uncomfortable with the entrenched roles invite readers, in the absence of critical discourse, to engage with the works in non-specified, at times forensic, ways of examination. I argue that this condition, more than a minor drawback of a normative industry, induces new behaviours and forms of social relationships. Each of the works that are featured in this collection explores the very substrate of its medium not as a culturally neutral site, but as a way to build alternative historiographies, replete with its own material properties and signifying potentials. They propose to examine how social and economic forces and their related sets of activities and commercial, communicative and other routines compose the media’s meaning-signifying trajectory. The rainforest of pulp production, the printer’s studio, the readers’ column and the landfill are not simply the industry's geographies but are technologies of inscription in their own right. They are the integral elements of a material language that actively shapes the medium and challenges the reader to negotiate meaning through different distributions of transparency over opacity in its products. This collection proposes to equally embrace the real, the unclaimed, the anticipated and the fictional practices, in their constant materialisation, and reflect on their specific sites of production in their potential to register meaning and organise discourse based on the inscriptions of this material language.
About Ilan Manouach
Ilan David Manouach is a researcher and a multidisciplinary artist with a specific interest in conceptual and post-digital art. He currently holds a PhD position at the Aalto University in Helsinki (adv. Craig Dworkin) where he examines the intersections of contemporary graphic literature and XXIst century’s technological disruptions. He is mostly known for Shapereader, a system for tactile storytelling specifically designed for blind and partially sighted readers/makers of comics. He is also the founder and creative director of Applied Memetic an organization that researches the political repercussions of generative art and highlights the urgency for a new media-rich internet literacy. His work has been written about in Hyperallergic, World Literature Today, Wired, Le Monde, The Comics Journal, du9, 50 Watts and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Wasting Time on the Internet. For a fuller documentation on the above projects, the Brussels-based non-profit Echo Chamber is responsible for producing, fundraising, documenting and archiving Manouach’s research on contemporary comics, that has been presented in solo exhibitions to important festivals, museums and galleries worldwide. He is an Onassis Digital Fellow and a Kone alumnus and he works as a strategy consultant for the Onassis Foundation visibility through its newly founded publishing arm.
Table of Contents
Creative Coding History
Modern Creative Coding Uses
Graphics Concepts
Creative Coding Environments and Libraries
Communication Protocols
Multimedia Tools
Unique Displays and Touchscreens
Hardware
Other output options
More resources
Comprehensive overview of existing tools, strategies and thoughts on interacting with your data
TLDR: when I read I try to read actively, which for me mainly involves using various tools to annotate content: highlight and leave notes as I read. I've programmed data providers that parse them and provide nice interface to interact with this data from other tools. My automated scripts use them to render these annotations in human readable and searchable plaintext and generate TODOs/spaced repetition items.
In this post I'm gonna elaborate on all of that and give some motivation, review of these tools (mainly with the focus on open source thus extendable software) and my vision on how they could work in an ideal world. I won't try to convince you that my method of reading and interacting with information is superior for you: it doesn't have to be, and there are people out there more eloquent than me who do that. I assume you want this too and wondering about the practical details.
This database* is an ongoing project to aggregate tools and resources for artists, engineers, curators & researchers interested in incorporating machine learning (ML) and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) into their practice. Resources in the database come from our partners and network; tools cover a broad spectrum of possibilities presented by the current advances in ML like enabling users to generate images from their own data, create interactive artworks, draft texts or recognise objects. Most of the tools require some coding skills, however, we’ve noted ones that don’t. Beginners are encouraged to turn to RunwayML or entries tagged as courses.
*This database isn’t comprehensive—it's a growing collection of research commissioned & collected by the Creative AI Lab. The latest tools were selected by Luba Elliott. Check back for new entries.
Via : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TkusCE5mS4tuTYoBwaTV4aJKdSVsf9jFKsGJCx8M05c/edit
This is a list of smaller tools that might be useful in building your game/website/interactive project. Although I’ve mostly also included ‘standards’, this list has a focus on artful tools & toys that are as fun to use as they are functional.
The goal of this list is to enable making entirely outside of closed production ecosystems or walled software gardens.
Explore the inventions, technology and ideas of science fiction writers
Date Device Name (Novel Author)
1634 Weightlessness (Kepler) (from Somnium (The Dream) by Johannes Kepler)
1638 Weightlessness in Space (from The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin)
1638 Gansas (from The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin)
1657 Moon Machine - very early description (from A Voyage to the Moon by Cyrano de Bergerac)
1705 Cogitator (The Chair of Reflection) (from The Consolidator by Daniel Defoe)
1726 Knowledge Engine - machine-made expertise (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1726 Geometric Modeling - eighteenth century NURBS (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1726 Bio-Energy - produce electricity from organic material (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1726 Laputa - a floating island (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1727 Androide - the original (from Cyclopaedia by Ephraim Chambers)
The new Collection online
From Dürer to the Rosetta Stone, explore 4.5 million objects.
The database is based on the British Museum's collection management tool, where we record what we know about our collection. It was created for the Museum to store information for its own use, and is therefore full of specialised terms, abbreviations and shorthand.
The Museum has been working on the database for more than 40 years and, even with more than two million records, we've only catalogued about half of the collection. We're adding and improving records every day but, even so, an object record may not have been checked. In many cases, the most recent research has not yet been added. There will be mistakes and omissions, but the Museum chooses to publish the data, rather than hold it until it is 'finished', as there will always be new information about an object. Only personal and sensitive information has been withheld.
a project to excavate shut down, abandoned web ruins and restore them to surfable, accessible, searchable, remixable condition
somewhere between a library and a living museum, we're working on experimental new ways to close the gap between archival and visibility of the web that was lost
launched
geocities
myspace music
on deck
aol hometown
netscape web sites
geocities japan
FortuneCity
tba
These 16,000 BBC Sound Effects are made available by the BBC in WAV format to download for use under the terms of the RemArc Licence. The Sound Effects are BBC copyright, but they may be used for personal, educational or research purposes, as detailed in the license.
Writing Machines is a resource dedicated to various projects related to electronic literature/books/writing/art curated by Julia Garcia
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization, established by fans in 2007, to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. We believe that fanworks are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate.
We are proactive and innovative in protecting and defending our work from commercial exploitation and legal challenge. We preserve our fannish economy, values, and creative expression by protecting and nurturing our fellow fans, our work, our commentary, our history, and our identity while providing the broadest possible access to fannish activity for all fans.
This is a directory of 249 links in 73 categories.
This directory is somewhat inspired by the old, failed link collections like the original Yahoo! and DMOZ. They were terrible—you couldn’t find anything, but what you did find was often unexpected. My ‘archivist’/‘forager’ tendencies want to do this.
Linking has kind of died in the wild. Google views a site like this as a link farm—so, directories have died off. Yeah, well, I find many of the ‘link farms’ in my Web/Directory list to be immensely ‘great’ and ‘satisfying’. More than anything, I hope mine intrigues you to build your own. This directory forms my connection to the rest of society.
I reserve the right to link to dipshits and crazies. I link to what piques my curiosity, what amazes me or what horrifies me. This includes you. (You know you want to participate.)
You might also look at it like: maybe I’ve friended these links. But instead of putting them in a big number that represents my friends—my 249 friends, you see—I list my friends out neatly and try to coax you to meet them.
Perhaps there is no need for friending. For likes. For upvotes. For hashtags. For boosts. For trending. For rank. For followers. For an algorithm.
Perhaps plain ole linking—and spending time telling you why I linked—is good enough, was always good enough. Perhaps it’s superior!
Welcome to Lospec, a home for digitally restrictive art. We create online tools for people creating pixel art and other restrictive digital art.
Digitally Restrictive Art
In the early days of computers, memory and storage space were a valuable commodity. Old hardware had very little space, every possible bit had to be conserved. Screen resolutions were small, and could only display a limited amount of colors. Music was stored as a sequence of notes rather than a single audio file. Games and programs had a maximum amount of space they could use, and they had to work within that restriction. Games made for the Atari 2600 could only be 32 kilobytes in total, including graphics, sounds, programming, levels.
Some people might view these restrictions as inconvenient, something that can only hinder your creative process. But there are many benefits to creating art within restrictions. Sometimes they simply help your get over art blocks by giving you a place to start, or help you use a consistent style throughout a piece. They can also force you to think in ways you might not have before and find creative ways to represent your vision. Your goal changes from "how can I best depict this subject" to "how can I best depict this subject within these limitations". You start thinking about the design, and level of detail. You are forced to simplify and prioritize, and consider the piece as a whole. It changes the whole creative process and forces you to think about your art from a new angle. The process of creating pixel art is completely different from even similar art forms like digital painting.
Some artists may impose restrictions upon themselves purposefully just to take advantage of these benefits. Some restrictions are just a result of that art form, like the canvas size of a painting or material of a sculpture. In Digitally Restrictive Art, the restrictions are brought on by the fact that they are stored digitally and is usually based on how the data is saved.
Pixel Art - The most popular digitally restrictive art form, as it was the only option for graphics on early video game systems. Though it's not required any longer, many games today still utilize pixel art due to it's aesthetic appeal, simplicity, and relative ease of creation. A large community of artists and fans still exists around the net.
Voxel Art - A more recent creation which is essentially a 3D version of pixel art. Instead of being made up of squares, it is made up of cubes. It's visuall similarity to pixel art makes it look like something out of the early computing days, but in reality only recently have computers been able to handle voxels.
Ascii Art - Similar to pixel art, but instead of being made up of pixels, everything is made up of ASCII characters, like letters and numbers. Before computers could even display pictures, artists could create images out of text. It was mostly notably adopted by the hacking community for use in text files.
Low-poly 3D - 3D models are typically made up of thousands of polygons, connected at their edges to create 3D shapes. In modern movies and games there are typically so many polygons that you can't see them and they look like a smooth surface. But in the early days of 3d, artists were limited to very few polygons. Low-poly models are still occasionally used in games today for memory restrictions as well as aesthetics. A subset of low-poly 3D includes using pixel art for the textures, adding another layer of restrictions.
Chiptune - Storing audio digitally actually takes quite a bit of space. Rather than reducing the length or quality of a song, early digital composers created a way to store songs as notes, which are then played at specified times, essentially being performed live by the computer. There are many different formats of digitally restrictive music that offer a whole array of different features and sounds. Midi files for example have a preset group of instruments you can assign to each note, and MOD/XM files let you create your own instruments out of waveforms.
This site tries to gather open-source remakes of great old games in one place. If you think that something is missing from the list - please go to our GitHub repository and create an issue or even a pull request!
Since all these projects are open-source you can help them and make this world a better place. Or at least you can play something to appreciate the effort people put in them.
Welcome to Planet eBook, the home of free classic literature! The latest version of the site, with its mobile-friendly design and multi-format eBooks, attempts to make our collection of eBooks available on all devices.
Existing free eBooks on the web tend to be well beneath the quality of paper books, making them more difficult and less pleasurable to read. In a small way, we’re trying to change this. Our goal is to publish a small selection of high-quality eBooks — each a genuine alternative for readers wanting to enjoy reading a book without having to pay for it.
The books we publish in Australia are all in the public domain and out of copyright. Please be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading.
Richard
The tl;dr
We should all be automating our image compression.
Image optimization should be automated. It’s easy to forget, best practices change, and content that doesn’t go through a build pipeline can easily slip. To automate: Use imagemin or libvips for your build process. Many alternatives exist.
Most CDNs (e.g. Akamai) and third-party solutions like Cloudinary, imgix, Fastly’s Image Optimizer, Instart Logic’s SmartVision or ImageOptim API offer comprehensive automated image optimization solutions.
The amount of time you’ll spend reading blog posts and tweaking your configuration is greater than the monthly fee for a service (Cloudinary has a free tier). If you don’t want to outsource this work for cost or latency concerns, the open-source options above are solid. Projects like Imageflow or Thumbor enable self-hosted alternatives.
How does our understanding of technology change when abstractions become tangible? In this course, paper acts as a bridge between code, mathematics, and our human sensory experience of the world.
When we fold, we imbue an inert material with pattern, structure, animation, function, and interface; a crease in paper is a re-programming of the material’s memory. Folded structures give us a means to touch and manipulate difficult problems and unlike simple machines (limited by static friction), folding systems can be applied at any scale, from nanometer to spacecraft scale. With an increased knowledge of folding mechanisms can we build more sustainable, ecologically-aware technology?
Lead by paper engineer and designer Kelli Anderson and origami artist and developer Robby Kraft, SFPC’s two-week session will explore the wide variety of ways that a piece of paper can produce function.
My goal is to include scripts from indigenous and minority cultures who are in danger of losing their sense of history, identity and purpose and who are trying to protect, preserve and/or revive their writing system as a way of reconnecting to their past, their dignity, their sense of a way ahead.
A traditional script is a visual reminder of a people’s identity — as we can tell by the number of cultures that continue to use their script as an emblem (on printed invitations, on shop fronts, even on the national flag) long after most people have stopped using it for everyday purposes.
Naming is hard. Names, after all, are perhaps the most indelible artifacts of the product creation process. Brands are redesigned with a lustrum regularity and codebases are continually rewritten and replaced but a name, for better or worse, usually sticks.
That’s because a good name is a hook that sets itself into a person’s mind, linking their brain back to your idea – try to reset the hook and you risk losing the connection. The process of naming, then, is the process of neatly packaging up that idea, discovering where it begins and ends so it can be linked as a discrete, easily remembered concept.
A good name can help a company or product become successful, of course, but it can also help the lowliest code library find an audience, help formalize an informal process, and propel ideas about the world toward becoming talking points throughout it.
And yet, what tools do we use for naming? What methodology? Many of us practice it informally, doing our best with thesauruses and domain name searches, never stopping to formalize an approach because it seems so devilishly simple – all you really need is a word or two in a language you’ve probably been using your entire life.
But like any art form, naming benefits from rich tools and processes, and this site is meant to help you discover them – to provide a starting point for anyone who needs to name something. That is: everyone, because every idea benefits from a good name.
»Conserve the sound« is an online museum for vanishing and endangered sounds. The sound of a dial telephone, a walkman, a analog typewriter, a pay phone, a 56k modem, a nuclear power plant or even a cell phone keypad are partially already gone or are about to disappear from our daily life.
Accompanying the archive people are interviewed and give an insight in to the world of disappearing sounds.
The Low-tech Lab is a collaborative research and documentation project aiming to share and promote low technologies. The programme's vocation is to spread local and efficient low-tech solutions widely in order to provide a global answer to the Sustainable Development Goals defined by the United Nations.
This programme is open to any person or structure willing to contribute to low-tech innovation or benefit from its discoveries.
Un bref résumé pour chaque jeu, des étiquettes pour identifier chaque style, genre, thème.
L’idée n’est pas de faire une critique de chaque jeu, juste de te permettre de guider tes lectures et tes choix en fonction de ce que tu recherches.
Sustainability practitioners have long relied on images to display relationships in complex adaptive systems on various scales and across different domains. These images facilitate communication, learning, collaboration and evaluation as they contribute to shared understanding of systemic processes. This research addresses the need for images that are widely understood across different fields and sectors for researchers, policy makers, design practitioners and evaluators with varying degrees of familiarity with the complexity sciences. The research identifies, defines and illustrates 16 key features of complex systems and contributes to an evolving visual language of complexity. Ultimately the work supports learning as a basis for informed decision-making at CECAN (Centre for the Evalutation of Complexity Across the Nexus) and other communities engaged with the analysis of complex problems.
This is (almost) everything I learned in design school in one website. Getting a design degree is not a waste of time. In fact, it's one of the best decisions I've ever made. However, most people aren't as lucky to have the sort of professors I did. Some people don't have the access, the ability, or the time to go to school for this stuff. And frankly, that 10-week design intensive is not going to make you a fantastic designer right out of the gate. You need something more.
You have to be self-sufficient. You have to be hungry to learn.
That's why this website exists. This is a list of everything I've found useful in my journey of learning design, and an ongoing list of things I think you should read. This is for budding UX, UI, Interaction, or whatever other title designers.
english : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
Cette liste des listes rassemble des liens vers des pages qui consistent en une liste ou qui comportent une liste.
processing_cheat_sheet_english.pdf
Thoroughly updated, this fourth edition focuses on modern techniques used to generate synthetic three-dimensional images in a fraction of a second. With the advent of programmable shaders, a wide variety of new algorithms have arisen and evolved over the past few years. This edition discusses current, practical rendering methods used in games and other applications. It also presents a solid theoretical framework and relevant mathematics for the field of interactive computer graphics, all in an approachable style. New to this edition: new chapter on VR and AR as well
Albert-Charles-Auguste Racinet (1825–1893), himself an accomplished artist, is best known today for publishing two major pictorial works on the history of design — Le costume historique and L’Ornement polychrome — while engraver and artistic director at the Parisian publisher Firmin Didot et Cie. Published in ten instalments between 1869 and 1873, the first iteration of L’Ornement polychrome (Colour ornament) is a visual record in 100 plates of the decorative arts from antiquity to the eighteenth century. The work was such a huge success that in 1885–7 Racinet brought out a second series, this time of 120 plates, and updated to include designs of the nineteenth century as well. The imagery presented in both series is drawn from a wide array of various mediums, including woodwork, metalwork, architecture, textiles, painting, and pottery, and from cultures all over the world.
Although based on past masterpieces of design, the fantastic reproductions in L’Ornement polychrome, carried out by a number of skilled commercial artists of the day, can be considered works of art in their own right. Indeed, for Racinet, the purpose of such a compilation of past design excellence was not only to celebrate the masters of the past but also to inspire an improvement of decorative arts in his own day and age.
The images featured here come from an excellent set of scans by RawPixel from their own 1888 edition of the first series. You can also leaf through the work in book form (again the first series) over at the New York Public Library.
What is Open Library?
Our goal is to provide a page on the web for every book ever published.
At its heart, Open Library is a catalog. The project began in November 2007 and has been inhaling catalog records from some of the biggest libraries in the world ever since. We have well over 20 million edition records online, provide access to 1.7 million scanned versions of books, and link to external sources like WorldCat and Amazon when we can. The secondary goal is to get you as close to the actual document you're looking for as we can, whether that is a scanned version courtesy of the Internet Archive, or a link to Powell's where you can purchase your own copy.
RACHEL is a portable plug-and-play server which stores educational websites and makes that content available over any local (offline) wireless connection. RACHEL makes deploying a library of digital content as easy as pushing a button.
Then simply turn it on. While RACHEL is on, take your device and connect to "RACHEL" as you would any wifi network. Then open a web browser and type the web address (a number listed on the front sticker of your RACHEL).
Once you're connected to RACHEL, you can instantly access offline versions of the world's best free educational websites including Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and over 100 more.
Demo :
http://rachelfriends.org/previews/rachelpi_64EN_4.0/
http://rachelfriends.org/previews/rachelpi_64FR_3.0/
http://rachelfriends.org/previews/rachelpi_64ES_3.0/
Build your own here : http://rachelfriends.org/rachel-pi-howto.html
Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville uses the phonautogram to record the human voice by tracing sound waves on smoke-blackened paper or glass. The resulting tracings could not be played back at the time, but in 2008 several tracings from 1860 were processed as digital audio files and successfully played back (1853)